Wednesday, October 19, 2011

What Are You Supposed to Be Anyway?

When I was at Ohio State our dorm was having a Halloween Party. It was a typical college party full of fun and drunken debauchery. We were all in our costumes cruising from room to room and floor to floor just having a good time in general. I was a ghost. I took the sheet off of my bed and cut a hole in it for my head and then I took my pillow case and cut out two eyeholes and circled them with black magic marker. (If I would have been smarter I would have cut out a mouth hole to make my drinking easier!)

A friend and I went into a suite of some friends of ours. They weren't there so we decided to visit some guys in a room we didn't know. (party, you know) We walked into their room and it was a room full of black guys. We started to laugh and talk with them but they weren't friendly at all. It was really starting to hurt my drunken feelings. Finally one of them said to me, "What in the hell are you supposed to be anyway?!" Of course I replied in my very West Virginia twang that I was a ghost. They all looked at each other as if to say, "yeah right".

It was obviously not a friendly atmosphere so my friend and I left.

Once we were out of the room my friend pointed out to me that they thought I was dressed as a KKK klansmen. My southern accent only made things worse. This had not even dawned on me as a costume possibility, but after looking in the mirror I could see where they would think that. I felt really bad about it and I wanted to go back to talk to them to tell them that I most definitely not a KKK person. My friend convinced me that it would be best not to make a big deal out of it though. It just goes to show that appearances are deceiving and you should never assume anything about someone.

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